As much as we love to report about the state of ‘other than WordPress blog software’ as well here at BloggingPro, we can not help but give the announcement of the newly introduced Movable Type 5 a WordPress spin. And how could we not; the announcement will be completely overshadowed by the new dashboard design of MT 5.

There is just too much resemblance to even bother putting both next to each other and point out all the similarities. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!To say that I am flabbergasted would be an understatement. I can only hope that this is a linkbait and buzz strategy to create some momentum and Six Apart already has a new dashboard design for a soon to be announced MT 5.1. If not, I guess… ‘GPL FTW!’ ?

For those who are interested in the new features:

A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.

A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.

Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

The introduction of content revision history is also an interesting one. I understand that most popular features of all systems find their way into other systems, no matter if blog software platform, operating system or cars, this is a normal process but MT5 has just a little too many similarities at first sight. The possible argument to ease the learning curve for switchers coming from WordPress is a valid one but would also mean that Movable Type admits having lost the battle with WordPress.

Author: Franky Branckaute

Franky is CEO, Editor and Muppet on Duty at Splashpress Media and sporadically blogs about the professional online life at his personal iFranky blog, when he isn’t annoying his colleagues or blog software evangelists. He also is regular Guest Lecturer on all things New Media and ‘blogging’. Stalk him on Twitter or on Google+

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Comments

As soon as I saw the MT screenshot I thought “what the heck?!” and right below I see you went on to mention this. I’d expect more originality from a company like Six Apart. If they are going to copy WordPress interface MT users might as well stop using MT and switch to WordPress.

I understand that most popular features of all systems find their way into other systems, no matter if blog software platform, operating system or cars, this is a normal process but MT5 has just a little too many similarities at first sight.

But this seems a little too much to just be an adaptation of ‘popular features’. It’s not about who has the menu bar at the left. Didn’t *nuke start that sometime early 00’s anyway? Or was it Mambo? Or Typo3? Or e107? I give up, everyone has a left sidebar.

There is a fine line between stealing and giving the users what they want.

If a company has figured out an optimal way to engage a user and that way is effective.

Why reinvent the wheel. If more and more companies relied on each others experience and added to it to make improvements where they see fit then the internet will be a more comfortable place for users to engage.

They won’t take 3days to try and relearn how and where designers display elements…

I agree with your points, Noel. But maybe it would have been better if SA had added those points to their announcement post and better even given the WP Dashboard designers a heads up. I gatehered from their reaction on Twitter that they weren’t aware and seemed rather shocked.

Nevertheless, I suppose it directed quite some attention to MT yesterday.

Maybe the new MT5 dashboard looks similar, but a lot of the features that are *now* in WP were introduced by MT and vice-versa.
Both software solutions are CMS
They’re obviously going to be influenced by each other, even if the developers aren’t conscious of the influences.
And if you want to knock MT at least you can’t do it on their security history. How long before anyone will be able to say that about WP?

This isn’t a “let’s try to be different” contest. It’s a “let’s make the best open source CMS/blogging platform contest”. Choosing what works best (i.e. a good UI) is indeed laziness. And as any decent programmer knows, (smart) laziness is a virtue. Rather than writing a UI which probably wouldn’t be as good as WordPress’s, why not take theirs, which works great, and build on top of it? That’s called code reuse. Basic concept. Not something to complain about.